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How I Learned To Do Incorrect Research Donald W Attwood
In 1969, the author started field research on rural poverty in western India. He began as a dependency theorist, but the villagers taught him to rethink his assumptions. He discovered that villagers (even landless labourers) have agency in their own lives and that the cumulative weight of their decisions and actions could reshape regional and national policy in the colonial and post-colonial periods. He found that growing an expensive cash crop does not impoverish small farmers. These discoveries went contrary to conventional wisdom, contrary to a strong consensus among social scientists around the world, contrary to the teachings of Marx, Lenin, and big-name dependency theorists. Despite his confidence in the data, he needed a reality check. How could he test whether he had misunderstood the lessons from the villagers?
This paper has had the benefit of comments, suggestions, and criticisms from many sources. My sincere thanks to Baldev Raj Nayar, B S Baviskar, Deborah Sick, Richard Wilk, Oliver Coomes, Laurel Bossen, Philip Carl Salzman, Robert Hunt, Frank Conlon, Doranne Jacobson, Tulsi Patil, and Arvind Shah. All remaining errors of fact or interpretation are entirely my own. Donald W Attwood (
[email protected]) is with the Department of Anthropology, McGill University. Economic & Political Weekly
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n 1969, I started field research in Maharashtra, intending to verify the premises of dependency theory. This was the hot new theory in development studies, thanks to the work of Baran (1957), Frank (1967), Cardoso (1972) and others who focused mainly on Latin America. It was also an old theory in the history of the Indian nationalist movement. Most of the premises of dependency theory could be traced back to ideas set forth by Romesh Dutt (1901, 1903) and other nationalists writing about the impact of British rule in India. The general argument was that Britain had enriched itself at India’s expense, making India a much poorer country. Dutt’s arguments and data revolved around tax and trade policies. These were connected, through a number of more or less plausible inferences, to conclusions about famines and the decline of India’s villages. For example, Dutt believed that Bengal was more fortunate than the rest of India thanks to the “permanent settlement” under which the British installed big landlords as tax collectors in the countryside (1901: 64-65). Most historians would not look at rural Bengal’s subsequent fate as a fortunate example of anything, except perhaps in comparison with Bihar, which was also part of the permanent settlement. In a similar but less plausible vein, S J Patel (1952) later argued that rural India had no landless labourers before British rule – making India unique among Old World civilisations. The British created the rural proletariat de novo by draconian tax laws and other measures that impoverished ordinary farmers. This idea was demolished by Dharma Kumar (1965), one of the best economic historians of the period, though her work was seldom noticed by the revolutionary intelligentsia of the 1970s and 1980s. vol xlv no 37
Intellectuals in the developing world loved dependency theory because it blamed the west for all their social and economic problems. Westerners also embraced the theory, partly because of outrage over the Vietnam War. As well, dependency theory had the merit of being a causal theory. The central idea was simple: the rich became rich by stealing from the poor, so the latter became poorer. There was much historical truth in this notion, but contrary to the assumptions of dependency theory, this truth was never confined to a colonial or capitalist context. We should distinguish dependency as theory from dependency as fact. There are many instances of dependency around the world: for example, Haiti is dependent on the United States, as is Costa Rica – with dramatically different consequences for the people of these two countries. Dependency relationships might be cited with reference to all great powers, particularly if internal colonialism is taken into account. But contrary to dependency theory, dependency relationships do not necessarily determine historical transitions or global trends. This was a totalising theory that claimed to explain all of history, politics, development, and underdevelopment in terms of one set of assumptions. In that respect, it resembled Marxism, from which it borrowed. Dependency theory produced important new questions and research. However, in development studies it became a secular religion, an unchallenged theory of everything. Like many religions, it soon became an obstacle to open debate and free inquiry. Much research which “proved” that dependency was impoverishing the poor was marred by selective bias and tautology. Before dependency theory, there was a loose set of ideas known as modernisation theory: developing countries would strive to copy the west and thereby not only industrialise but also become more western in social, political, cultural, even familial realms of behaviour. Modernisation theorists offered a variety of not always compelling explanations as to how this transformation would occur. Confronted by today’s world, such theorists might be puzzled by the fast-growing and/or
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resource-rich economies where western values are ignored, rejected, or used in highly selective and syncretic ways. Dependency theory hastened the demise of one theory that was doomed in any case. Among western intellectuals, the obsession with dependency theory was also due to the rise of another fad: neo-Marxism. The latter was an effort, manifested in a variety of formulae, to connect Marx’s work on the rise of capitalism with negative views on the spread of western influence in developing countries. Bitter debates over peripheral issues and vehement protestations of canonical orthodoxy were used to conceal the great gulf between most neoMarxist formulations and the central tenets of Marx’s work. (For all his flaws, Marx never assumed that economic exploitation was invented by colonialists or capitalists.) I aspired to join this radical elite by verifying the self-evident causes of poverty in India. After collecting ethnographic data, I would be ready to preach the evils of colonialism and neocolonialism. Instead, I ended up as a minor acolyte of Kumar and others who believed that intellectuals should build their ideas on careful logic and empirical evidence. How did I make this peculiar transition?
Not Doing Normal Science It is easier to explain how I started as a budding dependency theorist. First, I was young and eager for new ideas. Without offering excuses, let us agree that there is considerable merit in being drawn to new ideas. They should be noticed, applied, and tested; otherwise, the flaws in old theories will never be exposed. Second, dependency theory was far more interesting than the bland, ahistorical generalities of modernisation theory, which offered a world view suggesting that all countries were gradually moving up an escalator towards “development”.1 To its credit, dependency theory (and its derivatives, such as world-system theory) insisted that each country was not an autonomous rider on the escalator. Interactions between the more and less industrialised nations could put the latter at increasing disadvantage. Dependency theory offered a causal explanation of poverty in India. I assumed that my field research would provide ample data to verify this vision of
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the world. Let us reflect on this propensity towards verification. These days, few would seriously argue that social scientists can design their research from a culturally neutral, unbiased view of the world. However, there is and always has been a great gulf set between those who plan their research around a question (assuming more than one possible answer), as compared with those who believe they already have the important answers and plan to verify some little-known corollary of an established theory. Both types of researchers have their world views. Neither is unbiased. But there is an essential difference between them. Intellectuals of the latter type, those who know the big answers in advance, have been active for thousands of years. In the past, they were usually known as philosophers or priests. They debated fine points of doctrine within a context of laws laid down by nature or God. It is remarkable and disheartening to note how many social scientists still build successful careers by following the theological precedent. Of course, these people never admit to being theologians. Even those who attack some ill-informed, straw-man image of “science” (as an evil in itself) always lay claim to a new and superior understanding of the world, an understanding which is not derived from the old religions. Well, I was a theologian once. Starting out, my intention was to provide a case study illustrating how colonialism and neocolonialism had impoverished one part of rural India. The new perspective of dependency theory (new at least to western scholars) would provide the framework for my data collection and analysis. The contrast between new and old ideas brings to mind the distinction between “normal” and “revolutionary” science drawn by Thomas Kuhn (1962).2 Revolutionary science, which happens rarely, involves a dramatic break with past ideas about how the universe works. It solves old, dimly perceived, problems in new and exciting ways. It is usually followed by generations of normal science involving the systematic application and testing of the new ideas on a host of derivative problems. Back in 1969, I was keen to apply the revolutionary ideas of dependency theory. However, I had no real idea how
to practise the normal science that follows a revolution. In the physical and biological sciences, normal science is both rigorous and essential. And so it should be in the social sciences, except that “normal” social science often moves off in the direction of theological debate and sloppy verification, in which the core theory is rephrased, embellished, but never really questioned or tested. In recent years, the mere notion of systematically testing any set of ideas has been treated with scorn by people who seem to be collecting pay cheques as social scientists. In other words, debate in the social sciences often does not rise to the level of normal science. It is scholastic in the mediaeval sense. Initially, my own research plans did not rise to the level of normal science. I expected to collect data showing how colonialism had impoverished “the peasantry” in one region.3 However, circumstances conspired against me. I modelled my research design on the work of Epstein (1962), who compared two villages in Karnataka – one with canal irrigation and one without. I was drawn to the Deccan region of western Maharashtra because there too some villages received canal irrigation while others did not. I began research in one dry and one canal village: Supe and Malegaon, located about 20 km apart in eastern Pune district. I assumed that contrasts between these villages would help me understand the causes of poverty. And they did.
Cash Cropping and the Fate of the Small Farmer The western Deccan is semi-arid, the rainfall highly erratic. Life in the dry villages was precarious and always had been. There were minor irrigation works, but when the rains failed, rivers and aquifers dried up. This region had long been known as a famine belt. Before 1920, people died periodically by the tens and hundreds of thousands, sometimes by the millions, due to failures of the monsoon (Attwood 2005). The contrast with canal-irrigated villages was instructive. Malegaon has been irrigated by the Nira Left Bank Canal since 1885. When I first visited, there were obvious signs of prosperity. Some of the richer
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farmers owned motorcycles and tractors. Malegaon had its own high school, founded by the villagers. With irrigation, farmers were growing sugar cane, an expensive and profitable cash crop. A cooperative sugar factory had been established about two kilometres from the village centre. Farmers in Malegaon and 11 nearby villages constituted the shareholding members and collective managers of this factory, which paid high prices for their cane. The factory was also investing in social infrastructure: a new high school, a health clinic, and other facilities for members and non-members alike. The contrasts between Supe and Malegaon gradually undermined my assumptions. Consider how Malegaon’s history fits the premises of dependency theory. The Nira Canal was constructed under the British raj for famine prevention; it was not designed for cash cropping and certainly not to supply sugar to Britain. But at first the canal did not work well at protecting subsistence crops against droughts. Farmers sought canal water (which cost money) only after the rains had decisively failed, by which time it was often too late.4 Canal irrigation only became useful after sugar cane, an expensive cash crop, was introduced, whereupon canal officials established the “block system” for irrigating cane. As explained elsewhere (Attwood 1987, 1992, 2005), the cane block system also stimulated irrigation of subsistence crops, protecting them against droughts and thus increasing and stabilising food production in the region.5 Moreover, yearround cultivation and seasonal processing of sugar cane raised the demand for labour to unprecedented heights. This made it possible for cyclical and permanent migrants from the dry villages to escape famines and find reasonably steady employment in the canal villages. These simple facts were anathema to dependency theorists for at least two reasons. First, the Nira and other Deccan canals were constructed in order to enhance food security and thus provide relief from the worst effects of poverty. These canals were built as “protective” works. In contrast to the “productive” canals of northern India, the Deccan canals were not expected to repay their construction costs, though it was hoped that users would pay enough to Economic & Political Weekly
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cover annual administrative costs. This good deed did not, of course, mean that the raj had no ill effects on India, but it seemed that it had not been wholly bent on impoverishing India to enrich Britain. By the late 19th century, British rulers were somewhat sensitive to public opinion, and the Deccan canals were built partly in response to critiques of government inaction in the face of terrible famines in the latter part of that century (Attwood 2005). Second, cash cropping did not destroy “the peasantry”. Dependency theorists considered themselves loyal (though in peculiar ways) to the Marxist tradition. Lenin’s (1956) analysis of the development of Russian capitalism explained how commercial farming had transformed selfsufficient “peasants” into landless labourers. Lenin and his epigones assumed that “peasants” lacked assets to pay for new seeds, fertilisers, and equipment to grow cash crops. They probably also assumed that “peasants” were too dim-witted to cope with new opportunities. Only a lucky few with enough capital to build large commercial farms would be successful; the others would fall into debt, lose their lands, and join the landless proletariat. Like Marx, Lenin was mesmerised by economies of scale, which he thought applied to agriculture as to industry. But economies of scale do not always apply in agriculture, particularly where land is scarce and farming households provide most of their own labour (Ruttan 2004).6
Green Revolution and Inequality This point may seem academic now, but at the time (in the late 1960s), there was a huge controversy, with serious practical implications, over the social impact of the “green revolution” – that is, of the new, scientifically bred, high-yielding varieties of wheat, rice, and other foodgrains being introduced in Asia and Latin America. Opposition to the green revolution was based, in part, on unshakeable belief in Lenin’s model – except perhaps in Maoist China, where the new seed varieties were promoted with enthusiasm. Since I was able to study the effects of a century of commercialisation on the small farmers of Malegaon, I eventually concluded that opposition to the green revolution was hysterical, ideological, anti-empirical, vol xlv no 37
arrogant, and even inhumane, as it sought to deny food security to millions of small farmers (Attwood 1988, 2005). Let me explain how I came to this conclusion. Opponents of the green revolution argued that new cash cropping would generate class polarisation in the countryside: it would make rich farmers richer and poor farmers into landless tenants, sharecroppers, and labourers. To test this proposition, I devoted much effort to tracking changes in economic and social inequality over the previous 50 and 100 years in Malegaon. My initial results were based on oral family histories from a representative sample of villagers, covering the period from 1920 to 1970 (Attwood 1979). These family histories showed that there had indeed been big changes in the pattern of landholding and inequality but that the biggest changes were due to: (a) population pressure (because landholdings were divided evenly among sons), and (b) immigration of labourers fleeing poverty and famine in the dry villages and seeking employment in the canal villages. I did similar family-history research in Supe, the dry village. At a glance, there was far more inequality in Malegaon than Supe. Malegaon had a large class of landless farm workers (including migrant seasonal sugar cane harvesters), while Supe had hardly any landless labourers. Why was this so? Well, farming in Supe was unproductive and precarious, due to recurrent droughts. Farmers could not afford to hire labourers on a steady basis, so there were not many landless households. In Malegaon, conditions were quite different. There was a big class of landless labourers, mostly immigrants from the dry villages. Almost none had originally been farmers in Malegaon subsequently made landless by the perils of commercial farming. The farmers of Malegaon had spent much of the previous century producing an expensive cash crop, and a significant minority had become quite prosperous, as shown by purchases of land, construction of irrigation wells and new houses, etc. Overall, the small farmers of Malegaon had not been driven out of business by cash cropping or anything else; on average they were more prosperous in 1970 than in 1920. As predicted by Lenin, there was more class polarisation in Malegaon as compared
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with Supe, and this polarisation had increased during the 50 years from 1920 to 1970. But the reason was that Malegaon provided employment for more and more impoverished migrants from the dry villages. Here we must consider the difference between inequality and poverty. Immigrant labourers obviously found themselves in better economic circumstances, with better chances of survival, or they would have migrated in the opposite direction. Malegaon was importing a lot of poor people and thus more poverty and inequality. However, as compared with subsistence farming in the dry villages, this poverty was less severe thanks to the cash crop economy and its everincreasing demand for labour. Class inequality was growing in Malegaon because more and more labourers found employment there. But when all is said and done, which is the weightier outcome: (a) an expanding rural proletariat or (b) a rapid increase in the life expectancies of the rural poor – that is, a rapid decline in death rates for the entire population (bearing in mind that most of this population was rural and poor)? After 1920, mortality rates in the Deccan districts dropped sharply, and the total population curve rose steeply, uninterrupted by the recurrent famines of the past (Attwood 2005; McAlpin 1983; Visaria and Visaria 1983). These initial findings were verified by a restudy of Malegaon in 1978-79. I went back over the family history data with the same sample of villagers, seeking to rectify gaps and ambiguities that emerged from the first round of data collection.7 Of course, I also took the opportunity to add another decade of oral history. The results are explained at length in Raising Cane (Attwood 1992). Briefly, for families that were farming in Malegaon in 1920, there is not the slightest evidence of subsequent class polarisation. On the contrary, there is much evidence of upward economic mobility for a number of families who had little or no land in 1920. Conversely, there is also much evidence for downward mobility among those who had abundant land in 1920. However, the latter point should be qualified by noting that the main downward pressure on big landholdings was due to partitioning among multiple heirs, a pressure that affected
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smaller farmers as well. Still, the point vis-à-vis the Leninist model is that the big farmers in 1920 were not able to expand their holdings fast enough to counteract this demographic pressure. Quite the contrary, in fact. Several of the biggest landholders lost large tracts of land during the 1930s depression. These big farmers were ruined because they over-invested in an expensive cash crop and then got flattened by a worldwide depression. Smaller farmers hunkered down and rode out the depression because they were still, in part, growing crops for subsistence. Not only that, some small farmers (and even landless labourers) were able to buy cheap land in the late 1930s, sometimes on a large scale. This was possible because a number of the biggest farmers had been forced to sell land to cover their debts. Thus commercial farming provided bigger risks and opportunities, as the Leninist model assumes. However, the farmers and labourers of Malegaon neglected to read Lenin and managed their affairs contrary to his predictions. Yes, a number of farmers became much richer as a result of cash cropping, but they came from a wide variety of backgrounds. Some were even immigrant labourers from minority castes who bought up big chunks of cheap land late in the 1930s. They converted human capital (skills acquired while growing and processing sugar cane for their former employers) into physical and financial capital – just as small entrepreneurs do in any market economy. All this demonstrates the potent agency of these villagers. Instead of playing out an abstract scenario formulated by Lenin, they were busy learning new skills and seizing new opportunities. Such activities were far less feasible in the subsistenceoriented economy of a dry village like Supe. Innovation, entrepreneurship, and upward mobility by the poor: these opportunities are widely available only in a commercial economy. That said, I am much indebted to Lenin for providing the opportunity to do normal science. Once I began to question the assumptions underlying dependency theory, I found the Leninist model a fruitful source of testable hypotheses (Attwood 1979, 1992).
Farmers as Agents of History Apart from refuting the abstract determinism of the Leninist model, a number of other changes in the Malegaon area suggest the potent agency of ordinary farmers. Here are some of the headlines: First, as mentioned, canal officials had trouble persuading local farmers to use the Nira Canal as intended: for protective irrigation of subsistence crops. Soon after 1900, these officials introduced sugar cane blocks to increase the demand for canal water, inadvertently helping to prevent famines. (Sugar cane blocks raised and stabilised subsistence-crop production and the demand for labour, thus helping to prevent famines and fulfil the original purpose of the Deccan canals [Attwood 1987, 1992, 2005].) What was the source of this innovation? A set of immigrant tenant farmers, known as Saswad Malis, took the lead in growing sugar cane along the Nira Canal. The Malis, a caste of market gardeners, had long experience with irrigated cash crops. Before 1885, local experience had been mostly confined to unirrigated subsistence crops. Mali immigrants showed a new path forward to local farmers (mainly of the Maratha caste). Thus, decisions made by locals and immigrants had big effects on irrigation policy. Initially, local farmers declined to use canal water on a regular basis for subsistence crops. These crops were hardy enough to require irrigation only in times of severe drought, so low demand for canal water was rational in years of normal (though scant) rainfall. When the rains failed, the farmers would all rush to buy canal water, but no canal system can handle such an extreme spike in demand along its entire length (Attwood 1987, 2005). The usual low demand for water meant the canal administration was leaking torrents of money. But then the Malis began growing cane, and other farmers responded quickly to a trial of the sugar cane block system. Sugar cane was lucrative and demanded irrigation all year round. This led to permanent use of cane blocks, not only on the Nira Canal but also on several other canals built subsequently in the Deccan region. Second, if no solution had been found to the problem of low demand for Nira Canal water, other Deccan canals would
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never have been constructed, at least not in the British period. For geographic reasons, the Nira Canal water was many times more expensive than canal water supplied to the vast Indo-Gangetic plains of northern India (Indian Irrigation Commission 1902: 225). As a “protective” irrigation scheme, the Nira Canal was not expected to pay for itself. But if the canal had found no steady customers for its expensive water, further canal building in the Deccan districts would have been halted, leaving these districts more vulnerable to famines. Instead, the Bombay government financed a sevenfold expansion of Deccan Canal irrigation from 1903 to the 1930s (Attwood 1992: 60). Thus active production decisions by Nira Canal farmers, circa 1885-1900, had a big influence on future canal-building and famine prevention for the whole region (Attwood 1987, 1992, 2005). Third, a group of prosperous Saswad Malis moved away from the Nira valley to rent cheaper land along a new canal in nearby Sholapur district. There in 1934 they established a sugar factory – one of about a dozen new factories set up in Maharashtra after imposition of a tariff on imported sugar in 1932. (Under pressure from Indian nationalists, this tariff was enacted by the British raj to encourage industrialisation by Indian entrepreneurs. It worked.) The Saswad Mali Sugar Factory resembled others established at the time except for one major difference: it was owned and managed by cane growers, not urban investors. The Malis had again pointed the way towards future innovation. Fourth, soon after independence, several thousand farmers, big and small, organised India’s first cooperative sugar factory along another Deccan canal in Ahmednagar district (again, not far from Malegaon). Their model and inspiration was the Saswad Mali Sugar Factory. The Pravara cooperative factory began operation in 1951; it succeeded and was rapidly copied along all the Deccan canals. For example, the Malegaon Cooperative Sugar Factory went into operation in 1957.8 Fifth, as a result, cane growers along the Deccan canals quickly reshaped national policy. In 1954 the central government decided that preference would be given to cooperatives for licensing any proposed new sugar factories. (Earlier, the industry Economic & Political Weekly
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had been dominated by private factories, particularly in northern India.) This was during the era, 1956-91, when India tried to build a Soviet-style planned economy. Government policies and bureaucrats dictated virtually every aspect of industrial and commercial activity. In this case, national economic policies were directly shaped by the achievements of farmers in Maharashtra. Sixth, despite the planned economy, it must be emphasised that, in Maharashtra, each cooperative sugar factory was managed (quite efficiently in some cases) by its farmer-shareholders and the board of directors elected from among them. This was unusual in India and the developing world in general, where most “cooperatives” have been (mis)managed by government bureaucrats. In a planned economy, where the government was establishing huge industries under the direct control of state bureaucracies, it was taken for granted that bureaucrats would normally be put in charge of rural development, including the management of cooperatives. In this setting, the ability of mere farmers to manage large industrial enterprises was denied outright by many intellectuals, who tended to argue that the sugar co-ops were successful only because they were heavily subsidised by government. But as regards subsidisation, these co-ops were not a special case. During India’s Soviet period, most industries were either subsidised or directly managed by the State. Cooperative sugar factories benefited from easy access to official credit and (indirectly) from low irrigation rates. Yet subsidies went to most industries at that time, and there was much heavier subsidisation of the far less efficient sugar factories in northern India (Attwood 1989, 1992). The sugar co-ops in Maharashtra were peculiar in avoiding state management, which usually led, as in other countries, to inefficiency, corruption, and waste on a colossal scale (Bardhan 1984; Nayar 1989, 1990).9 Contrary to conventional wisdom, I was impressed with the managerial abilities, business acumen, and entrepreneurial skills that were evident in many cooperative leaders, who were also cane growers and politicians. In Maharashtra, many sugar co-ops quickly repaid start-up loans from the Industrial Finance Corporation, vol xlv no 37
an agency of the central government, in order to keep state officials at arms length. Quick repayment was made possible by efficient management. These coops also reinvested profits in expanding capacity and adopting new technologies (Attwood 1989). Seventh, the economic success of the cooperative sugar factories led them to branch out into other enterprises, such as production of paper, alcohol, and other byproducts. Success also encouraged them to invest in social infrastructure: schools, high schools, colleges, polytechnics, clinics, hospitals, even medical and engineering colleges. They made themselves centres of socio-economic growth and innovation.
Denial of Agency According to classic Marxist-Leninist theory, as well as dependency theory, village actors have no agency. They are merely pawns of deterministic forces set in motion by international capitalism. This assumption clearly did not fit the case in hand. Mere farmers were, in fact, building a successful industrial sector despite the crushing burden of government regulation in India’s Soviet period. No one could have foreseen just how things would play out after the neoliberal reforms of 1991; but to me it was obvious decades earlier that India was a tiger trapped in a very tight cage.10 Not only did dependency theory deny agency to the poor, it was ethnocentric. It assumed that the world was controlled solely by western actors: by western governments, corporations, development agencies, etc. In other words, the west is an active force in world history, while the east is passive. As Amartya Sen (2005) has pointed out, westerners have, over the centuries, adopted a variety of stereotypes regarding the east in general and India in particular. During my lifetime and until very recently, two images of India have prevailed: India as an exotic realm of snake charmers and holy men, or India as an impoverished, hungry, hot, overcrowded nation in crisis. (The two images can, of course, be combined.) Until the end of the 18th century, many Europeans in India had high respect for its intellectual, artistic, scientific, and other legacies. Then came the rapid expansion of British colonialism and the need for a
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ruling ideology of India as backward and benighted in all respects – a country in need of “civilising” (Dalrymple 2006: 9-10; Sen 2005: 146-50). Oddly, this colonial ideology had great influence on dependency theory. It may seem paradoxical that British colonial ideology should correspond with academic anti-colonial ideology, but the paradox is superficial. In both cases, it is assumed that the west is the sole agent of historical change. The only difference is that this notion was given a positive value by colonial rulers: the west brought modernity and progress to a static society. In contrast, dependency theorists saw the same process as negative: the west brought exploitation and impoverishment to the Garden of Eden. In both cases, the east was passive, the west was active, and the actions of the west determined the outcome. Both views denied agency to entire nations and civilisations. This was an absurd, Eurocentric view of the world (Goody 1990). It was bigotry, pure and simple.
Towards Insight The preceding sections present analysis after the fact. Here I would like to go back to the start, to explain how the assumptions of dependency theory were knocked loose from my head and how I arrived at a different view of the lives of village people. Following Epstein’s (1962) example, I began research by trying to do a census of Malegaon and Supe villages. Since both were quite large villages, I hired an experienced assistant to conduct the census surveys. However, he kept unnerving me by reporting that my simple questions did not produce straightforward answers. For example, how many adult males were living in a given household? Should we include a son who had gone away to college but was supported by his parents? Should we include a son who was working temporarily in another village or city? What if his wife lived with his parents in the village? Or what if she lived with him in the city but their children lived with his parents? Out of ignorance, I had started with questions based on assumptions that did not fit the patterns of people’s lives. I found myself making snap decisions about which sons were in or out of “the household”. My wish was to identify a set of
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comparable household units in order to do subsequent statistical analyses and draw a representative sample for intensive interviewing.11 This led me to ask fundamental questions but in the wrong way. I stumbled onto the right path once I got to the intensive interviewing: let the questions be open-ended. Take all the specific details and worry later about how to build an analytic pattern from the complex variations among households.12 This sounds like a fairly simple and obvious solution, but in all subsequent work with my interview data, I have found it maddeningly difficult to (a) do justice to the intricate variations among households, (b) uncover valid empirical patterns in the sample as a whole, and (c) construct a convincing explanation of these patterns. This is, in fact, a universal problem in the social sciences, though seldom admitted as such. This initial sense of perplexity and confusion laid the ground for insight, which came from the intensive interviews. Most of my interviews were with adult men, usually elder heads of households. (I was rarely allowed to interview women.) After a fairly small number of interviews, perhaps a dozen, I had my revelation. Each respondent had his own life – each had a story that was not predetermined by caste status, lineage membership, wealth or poverty, or other aspects of village social structure. Some interviewees had been involved in a variety of political movements; some had married in unusual ways; some had started new business enterprises with no connection to family or caste tradition. Some managed to cooperate with their sons or brothers (often to their mutual benefit), while others were at daggers drawn. More prosaically, some had found jobs in the new sugar factory; some had rented or mortgaged land; some had bought or sold land; some had added well irrigation in place of canal irrigation; some had experimented with new crops; etc. So that’s it: Everyone has his or her own life. Your life is not entirely shaped by your social status, or culture, or place in the world system. It is not exactly like your neighbour’s life, nor even your brother’s. We take this for granted in western cultures but often fail to notice it in other settings. I learned this and much else from the villagers, who were my teachers.
This is the bedrock on which I rest my other conclusions. Small farmers do an amazing variety of things, even living in the same village and sharing what is often and erroneously thought to be a highly conservative Hindu culture. Most families do not embody the predictions of Leninist theory or any other deterministic system – not even that which is so often attributed to the caste system. This discovery, which for me was an important insight at the time, may seem trivial to the postmodernists in the audience. Why, they might ask, didn’t I just get on with telling the stories of a few individual lives? I have done that, from time to time. However, I have also learned how to do normal science, and I do not want to give that up. In Raising Cane, I tried to strike a balance between describing the rich variations in villagers’ lives and also seeking the patterns that emerge from, and partly explain, these variations. In western cultures, we take for granted that there are both patterns and variations. In reporting other cultures, anthropologists sometimes run to extremes, presenting rigid, deterministic patterns (whether shaped by culture, capitalism, or globalisation) or else amorphous narratives based on no effort at systematic inquiry. The middle ground between these extremes is huge and fascinating.
Conclusion I hope readers can imagine what it was like to work in development studies in the 1970s and 1980s. At that time, across a wide range of disciplines and in all regions of the world, there was a strong consensus on a politically correct understanding of development problems. From my teachers, the people of Malegaon and Supe, I was learning to think incorrectly. For this I was shunned not by my fellow professors, most of whom were commendably polite and even open-minded, but by the graduate students of that era. Young people can be intolerant of political incorrectness. My real problem was that I knew I could be wrong. This is never a problem for those who agree with conventional wisdom. But to me, it seemed a logical consequence of knowing that even Ptolemy and Lenin had been wrong.
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Worrying about this, I was struggling to match wits with the universe. An unequal contest, to be sure: the universe is complex and inscrutable. At least I felt no qualms about matching wits with ideologues who assumed that one attack on low-caste labourers in one south Indian village (an event recycled in dozens of books and articles) offered proof of everincreasing class polarisation caused by the green revolution and presaging a red revolution (Attwood 1988). On such matters, the judgment of history is quite simple: there was no class revolution brewing in the countryside, at least not in the agriculturally more productive regions.13 So I did not worry overmuch about being laughed at by ideologues. But I did worry about making factual, methodological, or analytical slips that might allow my work to be dismissed by intelligent and open-minded scholars, such as M N Srinivas, the doyen of Indian sociology, or Dharma Kumar, the economic historian. Moreover, I wanted to achieve a coherent explanation of my results. After all, Lenin’s model rested on a clear set of causal hypotheses that could have explained how the world really worked. I was not satisfied merely with proving Lenin wrong; I wanted to offer something reasonably convincing as an alternative. I think that Raising Cane did achieve a fairly coherent explanation of the complex and messy history of cash cropping in and around Malegaon. However, in matching wits with the universe, you always lose. It is impossible to provide a coherent and complete explanation for complex historical trajectories. Thus I was worried about being wrong not because dependency theorists might be right but because the actual course of events was complex and difficult to explain. Fortunately, I found a remedy for this worry. The remedy was my mentor and friend, B S Baviskar. For a social scientist with an international reputation, he had an unusual and possibly unique background. He was born and raised in a small-farming household in a remote corner of Maharashtra. Initially, he had a very low chance of ever attending high school or learning any written language except Marathi, the official regional language taught in the schools but not spoken at home. Exceptional intelligence earned Economic & Political Weekly
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him a grant to attend high school in a town about 15 miles from his village. Exceptional public-speaking ability earned him a grant to attend college in Pune city. Eventually, he earned a PhD from India’s top sociology department, founded by M N Srinivas. Baviskar did his doctoral research back in his native milieu, in rural Maharashtra. He thus became one of a very small number of intellectuals of any stature ever to emerge from an impoverished rural background and then return to study other people in a similar context. He is one of a vanishingly small number of social scientists who can write about life in rural India using insight based partly on having grown up in a family of small farmers. We first met in 1969, when he was a lecturer at the Delhi School of Economics writing up his PhD thesis (Baviskar 1980). He later became a full professor and chair of the sociology department. He guided my research from the start, particularly my study of the cooperative sugar factories, which fascinated me as they did him. He persuaded me to join him in comparative research projects with a focus on cooperatives (see, e g, Attwood and Baviskar 1988; Baviskar and Attwood 1995). But for me, the most important result of this collaboration was that it provided a remedy for my worry that, in attempting to disprove one set of ideas, I was leading myself into a blind alley. Lessons learned from the people of Malegaon and Supe had me believing that small farmers were innovative and entrepreneurial; that they employed a great variety of techniques to advance their interests; that some rose from dire poverty to considerable wealth by village standards; and (most heretical of all), that they were not impoverished by cash cropping. Yet, all this information was collected and analysed by one fallible person. What if I was wrong? What if I saw patterns that did not exist? (The historical precedents were obvious.) The solution, of course, was to ask my friend to read my work before it was published and to give his honest opinion. This is common practice among scholars, but there were two aspects to this particular collaboration that were vital to the success, or at least the plausibility, of my work. First, India stands far ahead of almost any country in having a large and long-established corps vol xlv no 37
of expert social scientists. As an additional bonus (or threat, depending on how you look at it), these experts routinely work in English. Thus, my work had to withstand scrutiny not only by western social scientists but also (and this was far more intimidating) by Indian experts in the same fields. Indian scholars understand innumerable things about their own society that I will never fully grasp. To be a productive scholar, then, meant that I at least had to be accurate within the limited range of data that I tried to publish and explain. Second, Baviskar is not just any distinguished social scientist from India. As compared with his mentor, M N Srinivas, he did not become an international star. However, from my point of view, that was a minor concern. What sets him apart from nearly all social scientists anywhere is that he comes from a humble rural background. This means that, whether or not he propounds dazzling new academic theories, he has an unparalleled sense of how life is actually lived in the villages of Maharashtra, as seen from the combined standpoint of a villager and a social scientist. Because I was arriving at highly unorthodox, indeed heretical, interpretations of the family-history data from Malegaon and Supe, I badly needed someone to tell me whether my ideas made sense – not in terms of academic theory, but in terms of lived reality. Baviskar was the only person who could have helped me in this way, and he did so with great tact and insight. Insofar as I have a corpus of published work that makes sense and introduces new data and ideas, I owe this to my friend. Of course, as we often say in our acknowledgements, any remaining errors are still my own. But if B S Baviskar said that an idea made sense, I knew it would also make sense to the villagers who had taught me in the first place.
Notes 1 The escalator metaphor is borrowed from Allan Young of McGill University. 2 Kuhn’s innovative framing of the history of science was based partly on his solid, empirical study of the Copernican revolution (Kuhn 1957). 3 I have used the terms “peasant” and “peasantry” in the past but will no longer do so without inverted commas. “Peasants” in the academic literature are just small farmers somewhere else. In English and many other languages, the term “peasant” is also often used in a derogatory sense, so I have come to dislike it (see Attwood 1997).
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PERSPECTIVES 4 No large canal system can quickly provide irrigation along its entire length at the last minute. 5 Sugar cane blocks provided year-round irrigation for cane on one-third of each block area. The remaining two-thirds received eight-month irrigation, sufficient for double-cropping foodgrains in a region that had barely supported one food crop per year. 6 See Netting (1993) for explanations and examples of how small farmers have operated efficiently and durably in the premodern and modern worlds. 7 I did not tell my interviewees what I thought I had learned from them in the first round. One test of data quality was how consistent it was when retold after nearly 10 years. 8 These cooperative factories were successful largely because they solved the cane-supply problem that had retarded the Indian sugar industry (see Attwood and Baviskar 1987; Attwood 1989, 1992). 9 For example, the “cooperative” sugar factories established in northern India, supposedly modelled on those in Maharashtra, were a wasteful sham: managed by state officials, they delivered few or no benefits to the farmers nominally their shareholders (Batra 1988, 1995; Baviskar and Attwood 1995). 10 Recently, a growing number of sugar co-ops have fallen into well-publicised decay. The causes include: political corruption and mismanagement; too many licences granted to local big shots in a region of limited water supplies; very bad weather cycles (droughts and floods); and new government policies promoting competition yet constantly reconfiguring a tangle of controls over cane prices and sugar markets, etc. Even so, many sugar co-ops in Maharashtra remain resilient, productive, efficient, innovative, and promoters of social investment in their local areas (see Attwood and Baviskar nd). 11 There were other ways of drawing a representative sample, but I was not well trained in methodology. I tried to follow Epstein’s (1962) example by rote. 12 This was one reason I abandoned the idea of using my census data for statistical analysis. 13 Separatist and leftist movements keep popping up, but they are mainly caused by misgovernment, by official disdain for human rights, and by mega-“development” projects for extracting hydropower or minerals without compensation to indigenous peoples in the more marginal regions.
References Attwood, D W (1979): “Why Some of the Poor Get Richer: Economic Change and Mobility in Rural Western India”, Current Anthropology, 20(3): 495-508. – (1987): “Irrigation and Imperialism: The Causes and Consequences of a Shift from Subsistence to Cash Cropping”, Journal of Development Studies, 23(3): 241-66. – (1988): “Poverty, Inequality and Economic Growth in Rural India” in D W Attwood, T C Bruneau and J G Galaty (ed.), Power and Poverty (Boulder and London: Westview Press), 13-29. – (1989): “Does Competition Help Cooperation?”, Journal of Development Studies, 26(1): 5-27. – (1992): Raising Cane: The Political Economy of Sugar in Western India (Boulder: Westview Press and Delhi: Oxford University Press). – (1997): “The Invisible Peasant” in R Blanton, T Hall, P Peregrine and D Winslow (ed.), Economic Analysis beyond the Local System (Lanham, MD: University Press of America), 147-69. – (2005): “Big Is Ugly? How Large-Scale Institutions Prevent Famine in Western India”, World Development, 33(12): 2067-83. Attwood, D W and B S Baviskar (1987): “Why Do Some Cooperatives Work But Not Others? A Comparative
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Analysis of Sugar Cooperatives in India”, Economic & Political Weekly, 22(26): A38-A56. – ed. (1988): Who Shares? Cooperatives and Rural Development (Delhi: Oxford University Press). – (nd): “Cooperatives Then and Now: The Sugar Industry in Western India Before and After the Shift toward Neoliberalism” (work in progress). Baran, Paul (1957): The Political Economy of Growth (New York: Marzani and Munsell). Bardhan, Pranab (1984): The Political Economy of Development in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press). Batra, S M (1988): “Agrarian Relations and Sugar Cooperatives in North India” in D W Attwood and B S Baviskar (ed.), Who Shares? Cooperatives and Rural Development (Delhi: Oxford University Press), 91-111. – (1995): “Dominant Classes and Cooperative Leaders in Western Uttar Pradesh” in B S Baviskar and D W Attwood (ed.), Finding the Middle Path: The Political Economy of Cooperation in Rural India (Boulder: Westview and Delhi: Sage), 323-41. Baviskar, B S (1980): The Politics of Development: Sugar Co-operatives in Rural Maharashtra (Delhi: Oxford University Press). Baviskar, B S and D W Attwood (1995): Finding the Middle Path: The Political Economy of Cooperation in Rural India (Boulder: Westview and Delhi: Sage). Cardoso, F E (1972): “Dependency and Development in Latin America”, The New Left Review, 74: 83-95. Dalrymple, William (2006): The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857 (London: Bloomsbury). Dutt, R C (1901): The Economic History of India under Early British Rule (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). – (1903): The Economic History of India in the Victorian Age (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). Epstein, T S (1962): Economic Development and Social Change in South India (Bombay: Oxford University Press). Frank, A G (1967): Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (New York: Monthly Review Press). Goody, Jack (1990): The Oriental, the Ancient, and the Primitive (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Indian Irrigation Commission (1902): Minutes of Evidence: Bombay Presidency, Office of the Superintendent, Government Printing, Calcutta. Kenny, C (2005): “Why Are We Worried About Income? Nearly Everything That Matters Is Converging”, World Development, 33(1): 1-19. Kuhn, T S (1957): The Copernican Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). – (1962): The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Kumar, Dharma (1965): Land and Caste in South India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Lenin, V I (1956 [1908]): The Development of Capitalism in Russia (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House). McAlpin, M B (1983): Subject to Famine: Food Crises and Economic Change in Western India, 1860-1920 (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Nayar, B R (1989): India’s Mixed Economy (Bombay: Popular Prakashan). – (1990): The Political Economy of India’s Public Sector (Bombay: Popular Prakashan). Netting, R M (1993): Smallholders, Householders: Farm Families and the Ecology of Intensive, Sustainable Agriculture (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Patel, S J (1952): Agricultural Labourers in Modern India and Pakistan (Bombay: Current Book House). Ruttan, V W (2004): “Controversy about Agricultural Technology: Lessons from the Green Revolution”, International Journal of Biotechnology, 6(1): 43-54. Sen, Amartya (2005): The Argumentative Indian (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux). Visaria, L and P Visaria (1983): “Population (1757-1947)” in D Kumar and M Desai (ed.), The Cambridge Economic History of India, Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 463-532.
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